These Pan-Turanian aspirations undoubtedly had a great deal to do with driving Turkey into the Great War on the side of the Central Empires. Certainly, Enver Pasha and most of the other leaders of the governing group had long been more or less affiliated with the Pan-Turanian movement. Of course the Turkish Government had more than one string to its bow. It tried to drive Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islamism in double harness, using the "Holy War" agitation for pious Moslems everywhere, while it redoubled Pan-Turanian propaganda among the Turko-Tartar peoples. A good statement of Pan-Turanian ambitions in the early years of the war is that of the publicist Tekin Alp in his book, The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal, published in 1915. Says Tekin Alp: "With the crushing of Russian despotism by the brave German, Austrian, and Turkish armies, 30,000,000 to 40,000,000 Turanians will receive their independence. With the 10,000,000 Ottoman Turks, this will form a nation of 50,000,000, advancing toward a great civilization which may perhaps be compared with that of Germany, in that it will have the strength and energy to rise even higher. In some ways it will be superior to the degenerate French and English civilizations."
With the collapse of Russia after the Bolshevik revolution at the end of 1917, Pan-Turanian hopes knew no bounds. So certain were they of triumph that they began to flout even their German allies, thus revealing that hatred of all Europeans which had always lurked at the back of their minds. A German staff-officer thus describes the table-talk of Halil Pasha, the Turkish commander of the Mesopotamian front and uncle of Enver: "First of all, every tribe with a Turkish mother-tongue must be forged into a single nation. The national principle was supreme; so it was the design to conquer Turkestan, the cradle of Turkish power and glory. That was the first task. From that base connections must be established with the Yakutes of Siberia, who were considered, on account of their linguistic kinship, the remotest outposts of the Turkish blood to the eastward. The closely related Tartar tribes of the Caucasus must naturally join this union. Armenians and Georgians, who form minority nationalities in that territory, must either submit voluntarily or be subjugated.... Such a great compact Turkish Empire, exercising hegemony over all the Islamic world, would exert a powerful attraction upon Afghanistan and Persia.... In December, 1917, when the Turkish front in Mesopotamia threatened to yield, Halil Pasha said to me, half vexed, half jokingly: 'Supposing we let the English have this cursed desert hole and go to Turkestan, where I will erect a new empire for my little boy.' He had named his youngest son after the great conqueror and destroyer, Jenghiz Khan."[165]
As a matter of fact, the summer of 1918 saw Transcaucasia and northern Persia overrun by Turkish armies headed for Central Asia. Then came the German collapse in the West and the end of the war, apparently dooming Turkey to destruction. For the moment the Pan-Turanians were stunned. Nevertheless, their hopes were soon destined to revive, as we shall presently see.
Before describing the course of events in the Near East since 1918, which need to be treated as a unit, let us go back to consider the earlier developments of the other "second-stage" nationalist movements in the Moslem world. We have already seen how, concurrently with Turkish nationalism, Arab nationalism was likewise evolving into the "racial" stage, the ideal being a great "Pan-Arab" empire, embracing not merely the ethnically Arab peninsula-homeland, Syria, and Mesopotamia, but also the Arabized regions of Egypt, Tripoli, French North Africa, and the Sudan.
Pan-Arabism has not been as intellectually developed as Pan-Turanism, though its general trend is so similar that its doctrines need not be discussed in detail. One important difference between the two movements is that Pan-Arabism is much more religious and Pan-Islamic in character, the Arabs regarding themselves as "The Chosen People" divinely predestined to dominate the whole Islamic world. Pan-Arabism also lacks Pan-Turanism's unity of direction. There have been two distinct intellectual centres—Syria and Egypt. In fact, it is in Egypt that Pan-Arab schemes have been most concretely elaborated, the Egyptian programme looking toward a reunion of the Arab-speaking lands under the Khedive—perhaps at first subject to British tutelage, though ultimately throwing off British control by concerted Pan-Arab action. The late Khedive Abbas Hilmi, deposed by the British in 1914, is supposed to have encouraged this movement.[166]
The Great War undoubtedly stimulated Pan-Arabism, especially by its creation of an independent Arab kingdom in the Hedjaz with claims on Syria and Mesopotamia. However, the various Arab peoples are so engrossed with local independence agitations looking toward the elimination of British, French, and Italian control from specific regions like Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Tripoli, that the larger concept of Pan-Arabism, while undoubtedly an underlying factor, is not to-day in the foreground of Arab nationalist programmes.
Furthermore, as I have already said, Pan-Arabism is interwoven with the non-racial concepts of Pan-Islamism and "Pan-Islamic Nationalism." This latter concept may seem a rather grotesque contradiction of terms. So it may be to us Westerners. But it is not necessarily so to Eastern minds. However eagerly the East may have seized upon our ideas of nationality and patriotism, those ideas have entered minds already full of concepts like Islamic solidarity and the brotherhood of all True Believers. The result has been a subtle coloration of the new by the old, so that even when Moslems use our exact words, "nationality," "race," etc., their conception of what those words mean is distinctly different from ours. These differences in fact extend to all political concepts. Take the word "State," for example. The typical Mohammedan state is not, like the typical Western state, a sharply defined unit, with fixed boundaries and full sovereignty exercised everywhere within its frontiers. It is more or less an amorphous mass, with a central nucleus, the seat of an authority which shades off into ill-defined, anarchic independence. Of course, in the past half-century, most Mohammedan states have tried to remodel themselves on Western lines, but the traditional tendency is typified by Afghanistan, where the tribes of the Indian north-west frontier, though nominally Afghan, enjoy practical independence and have frequently conducted private wars of their own against the British which the Ameer has disavowed and for which the British have not held him responsible.
Similarly with the term "Nationality." In Moslem eyes, a man need not be born or formally naturalized to be a member of a certain Moslem "Nationality." Every Moslem is more or less at home in every part of Islam, so a man may just happen into a particular country and thereby become at once, if he wishes, a national in good standing. For example: "Egypt for the Egyptians" does not mean precisely what we think. Let a Mohammedan of Algiers or Damascus settle in Cairo. Nothing prevents him from acting, and being considered as, an "Egyptian Nationalist" in the full sense of the term. This is because Islam has always had a distinct idea of territorial as well as spiritual unity. All predominantly Mohammedan lands are believed by Moslems to constitute "Dar-ul-Islam,"[167] which is in a sense the joint possession of all Moslems and which all Moslems are jointly obligated to defend. That is the reason why alien encroachments on any Moslem land are instantly resented by Moslems at the opposite end of the Moslem world, who could have no possible material interest in the matter.
We are now better able to understand how many Moslem thinkers, combining the Western concept of nationality with the traditional idea of Dar-ul-Islam, have evolved a new synthesis of the two, expressed by the term "Pan-Islamic Nationalism." This trend of thought is well set forth by an Indian Moslem, who writes: "In the West, the whole science of government rests on the axiom that the essential divisions of humanity are determined by considerations of race and geography; but for Orientals these ideas are very far from being axioms. For them, humanity divides according to religious beliefs. The unity is no longer the nation or the State, but the 'Millah.'[168] Europeans see in this a counterpart to their Middle Ages—a stage which Islam should pass through on its way to modernity in the Western sense. How badly they understand how religion looks to a Mohammedan! They forget that Islam is not only a religion, but also a social organization, a form of culture, and a nationality.... The principle of Islamic fraternity—of Pan-Islamism, if you prefer the word—is analogous to patriotism, but with this difference: this Islamic fraternity, though resulting in identity of laws and customs, has not (like Western Nationality) been brought about by community of race, country, or history, but has been received, as we believe, directly from God."[169]
Pan-Islamic nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon and has not been doctrinally worked out. Nevertheless it is visible throughout the Moslem world and is gaining in strength, particularly in regions like North Africa and India, where strong territorial patriotism has, for one reason or another, not developed. As a French writer remarks: "Mohammedan Nationalism is not an isolated or sporadic agitation. It is a broad tide, which is flowing over the whole Islamic world of Asia, India, and Africa. Nationalism is a new form of the Mohammedan faith, which, far from being undermined by contact with European civilization, seems to have discovered a surplus of religious fervour, and which, in its desire for expansion and proselytism, tends to realize its unity by rousing the fanaticism of the masses, by directing the political tendencies of the élites, and by sowing everywhere the seeds of a dangerous agitation."[170] Pan-Islamic nationalism may thus, in the future, become a major factor which will have to be seriously reckoned with.[171]